The War in Iraq was Story of the Year by a wide margin. The networks monitored the progress of Commander in Chief George Bush's troop build-up--the so-called surge--in Iraq and the simultaneous debate on Capitol Hill about bringing troops home.

That storyline effectively ended in September when Gen David Petraeus testified to Congress that violence in Iraq was moderating and the President ordered the extra troops home. Before that testimony, the Iraq War averaged 30 minutes of coverage each week; in the year's final 15 weeks the average was a scant four minutes. Non-war coverage of Iraq continues its steady decline.

In the fall, the networks turned their attention to Campaign 2008. Next year's race for the White House attracted more coverage than the last four penultimate years combined.

Only two other international hotspots--Pakistan and Iran--appeared in the year's Top 20 besides Iraq. The networks' foreign bureaus had their lightest workload since 2001.

The War on Terrorism is cooling down even as Planet Earth, as Nobel Laureate Al Gore inconveniently warns us, is heating up. Coverage of the Environment (476 min v 302 last year) now matches that of Terrorism (483 min v 1191 last year).

The Health beat (1110 min) had its third-busiest year since 1993, when Hillary Rodham Clinton, in vain, proposed universal care. CBS (423 min v 334 in '06, 279 in '05) leads the way.

The Most Newsworthy Woman of the Year: Benazir Bhutto, assassinated during her bid to return to power in Pakistan. The Year's Most Newsworthy Man: the aforementioned Petraeus.

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Each day, Andrew Tyndall blogs the three newscasts. He has been monitoring
television news for 20 years. He claims to be the only person on the planet
who has personally watched every single weekday network nightly newscast
since the summer of 1987. Other people go on vacation: he records them all
and logs the news he missed into his database when he returns.